November, 2012

We shared this on our Facebook page on Thursday, but it’s worth a re-post for those of you who weren’t glued to your computers and mobile devices during the holiday. The photo above shows Chael Sonnen predictably going for a leg while Jon Jones — a menacing figure even without a sharp object — puts on his best bad-guy face and straight up dwarfs the gangster from West Linn. We’d like to congratulate the New Jersey State Athletic Control Board for their bravery in sanctioning this one.

In the pro wrestling world, this sort of thing is called “breaking kayfabe,” a moment where the fictional storylines and personas are temporarily discarded, revealing that the whole thing is fake. Yeah, I know Jones has been warming up to Sonnen, who is “pretty decent and pretty classy” all of a sudden. But damn, it sure didn’t take long to go from calling each other cowards, cheaters, mental midgets, and selfish, entitled brats, to “bro, are you bringing the cranberries or do I have to run out to Whole Foods again?”

So how do these two really feel about each other — and how much of their interaction on the next season of TUF will be staged for our amusement?

Hieron is an unexpected choice for Silva’s return opponent, as the Thoroughbred is currently in the “hanging on by a thread” stage of his UFC career. When Hieron lost a unanimous decision to Jake Ellenberger during his promotional return fight in October, his lifetime UFC record dropped to 0-3 — which means that if Hieron loses this next fight, he’ll become just the fourth fighter in UFC history to go 0-4 in the Octagon, after Tiki Ghosn, Seth Petruzelli, and John Alessio. And trust me, brother, that is not a club you want to join.

It can be argued that no losing fighter has ever deserved one of UFC’s famous locker-room bonus checks than Fabio Maldonado after his downright terrifying loss to Glover Teixeira at UFC 153.

If this was professional wrestling, we’d say this was the fight that got Glover “over” in the UFC. The brutal asskicking that Teixeira dished out transitioned him from MMA’s best-kept secret to a legitimate light-heavyweight contender, causing fans throughout the world to say “Huh, so that’s what a 10-7 round looks like.”

Yet Fabio Maldonado kept fighting back, almost pulling off one of the most insane comebacks in UFC history as he rocked Teixeira near the end of the first round. Maldonado kept coming back for more until the cageside doctor put an end to the fight after the second round. I’m not going to write something cheesy like “it was a moral victory for Fabio Maldonado,” but I would understand why a person would.

The beating that Fabio Maldonado took wasn’t for nothing – at least not financially. Maldonado revealed on his Facebook page that he recently received one of the UFC’s famed locker-room bonus checks, and it was worth more money than his win bonus would have been. Via MMAWeekly:

There’s no need for a wordy introduction here: Strikeforce has officially become so incompetent that it can’t even die correctly.

After canceling two consecutive events, Strikeforce planned to have an absolutely stacked grand finale on January 12, 2013 featuring three title fights and Heavyweight Grand Prix champion Daniel Cormier. Much like everything else that Strikeforce has planned since being purchased by Zuffa, things quickly went wrong. First, lightweight kingpin Gilbert Melendez got injured/realized he was in a no-win scenario fighting for Strikeforce again and pulled out of the event. Now, middleweight champion Luke Rockhold is also off of the card, citing a wrist injury as the reason for his departure. According to The MMA Corner:

The MMA Corner has learned from sources close to the camp of Rockhold that the middleweight champion has suffered a wrist injury and has been forced to withdraw from his scheduled Jan. 12 title defense against Lorenz Larkin.

It’s safe to say that we should all be thankful that 2012 is almost over. This has been a rough year to be an MMA fan, and with a damn-near legendary injury curse spanning the last eleven months, it’s been just as hard on the fighters. But this has been an especially hard year for UFC veteran Dennis Hallman, whose house burned down in the early hours of Thanksgiving morning.

As Hallman told MMAFighting.com, the cause of the fire is unknown, but authorities believe it was an electrical fire. No one was hurt, but Dennis Hallman has lost everything to the fire.

Puerto Rican boxing champion Hector “Macho” Camacho, famous for his aggressive style and flamboyant behavior in and out of the ring, was declared dead earlier today in San Juan, four days after he and his friend were shot in a parked car in the city of Bayamon. Hector Camacho, who was taken off of life support earlier this morning, died of a heart attack shortly afterwards, according to Dr. Ernesto Torres of the Centro Médico trauma center. His friend, Adrian Mojica Moreno, died immediately.

Details regarding the shooting are still being kept quiet. However, police have confirmed that Mojica had nine bags of cocaine on him when he was shot and that a tenth bag was found open in the car. No arrests have been made, and according to police spokesman Alex Diaz, neither man was expecting the attack.

Inside the ring, ‘Macho’ Camacho was one of the greatest to lace up the gloves. After winning three Golden Gloves titles as an amateur, he turned pro and quickly became a contender due to his aggressive, albeit cocky style of fighting. With Don King promoting him, Camacho would go on to win his first world title, the WBC Super Featherweight Championship, on Aug. 7, 1983. He would vacate the title to move up to lightweight two years later, capturing the WBC lightweight title by defeating Jose Luis Ramirez on August 10, 1985.

There was a period of time, back around 2004-2005, when folks spoke about a young welterweight named Georges St. Pierre as if it were inevitable that the Canadian would one day be the welterweight champion of the world. These days, the same type of hype surrounds St. Pierre’s training partner Rory MacDonald.

Rory will be fighting BJ Penn next on the UFC on Fox 5 card but is so good and so young that he constantly has to answer the question of whether or not he’d fight his Tri-Star stablemate St. Pierre.

Before last week’s UFC 154 in his home town of Montreal, MacDonald answered questions from fans. If you hear past Rory’s dry delivery and watch the whole session (above) you’ll be treated to an earnest sounding kid, both full of confidence and hard on himself (for example, he refers to his loss to Condit as getting his ass kicked instead of losing at the very end of a fight he was previously winning).

MacDonald believes with certainty that he will become the welterweight champion one day but says that “me and Georges are not going to fight.”

(Unless you plan on “purging” that, Anderson, you may need to switch your diet up a bit to make 170 pounds)

It never really becomes crystal clear if we’re getting closer to MMA’s two best pound-for-pound fighters fighting one another or further away from it. UFC middleweight champ Anderson Silva has finally warmed to the idea of fighting welterweight king Georges St. Pierre, six years after each man won their first world titles.

Well, Silva has more than warmed to the idea. He’s practically begging for the fight.

He even hijacked St. Pierre and Carlos Condit’s special Primetime moment to lobby for the bout. The much smaller St. Pierre, however, doesn’t seem to like the idea of fighting Anderson nearly as much.

GSP has only gone so far as to wonder out loud if Silva could once again make the welterweight limit, and his head coach has said he’d only want his charge taking the bout if it was at welterweight, not at a heavier catch weight, as Silva’s camp has suggested in the past.

Alright, let’s say that GSP gets his way and Anderson gets on a Machinist diet and gets down to welterweight…unlikely but if he did we could get more than a “legacy fight.” We’d get an honest to goodness, here and now title fight.

Well, don’t you worry your pretty lil head about that exciting possibility. UFC President Dana White is here to dampen your enthusiasm.

When asked last Saturday if GSP’s belt would be on the line if “The Spider” came down in weight to fight him, White replied, “Probably not, because I don’t know how many times Anderson would actually defend it.”

Great. So if St. Pierre gets his wish he’d be fighting an emaciated Silva who wouldn’t even have the incentive of getting a hold of another title belt if he earned it with a win.

Unless Uncle Dana was just being crazy like a match-making fox. Hear me out.

For a number of reasons having to do with the sport’s culture, rule set and diversity of techniques, MMA simply is not as dangerous a sport as, say, boxing or American football in terms of brain trauma. That said, it is still quite dangeous and fighteres face a myriad of potential dangers in training and in competition.

Featherweight Eddie Yagin was just ordered to take six months off from MMA to let his brain heal. Many other active fighters conceal or ignore brain trauma and don’t retire or take the rest they need in order to hopefully have some quality of life as they age.

So when UFC bantamweight Nick Denis announced on his tumblr blog this week that he had decided to retire from MMA, it was bittersweet. Bitter because the international community had only begun to see how skilled and talented the twenty nine year-old was after two fights in the globe’s top organization. Sweet because, as he detailed on his blog, he made a thoughtful and proactive decision to protect what is left of his health.

One of hardest things for athletes to do is walk away, no matter their physical condition or age, because it means a forced change of identities. They have to find a new way to define themselves, a new set of activitites to spend their lives doing.

Denis seems at peace with his decision and confident that he will find new things to “obsess” over. We are glad and we hope so.

His written statement announcing his retirement is insightful, moving and inspirational. Read it and then go out and get started pursuing dreams and accomplishments that will make you worthy of a nickname as awesome as the one Nick “The Ninja of Love” Denis has.

“I would like to think that I don’t have an ego. Sometimes though, I think it might just be so big that it can’t be hurt.

I really believe in living life. I always tell people, quite casually, ‘follow your heart.’ I don’t just say it for the sake of having words come out of my mouth, it is something that I truly believe in and do. I couldn’t imagine living my life and ignoring my true feelings and desires, just for the sake of living a ‘rational’ and safe lifestyle. That is why I quit my Ph.D. in biochemistry to move to Montreal, train full-time and make my way to the UFC.

To me, it was the only available option. What other choice did I have?

MMA Fighting reports that charges against retired former UFC fighter Jason “Mayhem” Miller from an August arrest have been dropped in the Orange County Superior Court. You may remember the allegations as perhaps the most bizzare ones of Miller’s life, which is saying something.

“Miller was arrested Aug. 13 in Mission Viejo, Calif., on burglary charges after he allegedly broken into a church, sprayed a fire extinguisher and broke many items. According to a spokesperson for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, Miller was found by police naked on a couch in the church. He was not intoxicated and was arrested without incident,” MMA Fighting recounts.

According to the news site, Miller said that the case against him was dropped and that the arrest has been removed from his criminal record. “God is good,” he was reported as saying.

Just as his long and accomplished fighting career is often ignored by newer fans in light of his recent UFC performances, the fact that Miller is a friendly and good guy can often be lost amidst all of his public antics and schtick.

He has a lot to offer, even as a retired fighter. Let’s hope that his days of allegdly breaking into churches and women’s houses are behind him.

Not too long ago Miller took a stroll through New York City’s Central Park with MMA Fighting and discussed the arrest and other issues. Check out the full video interview after the jump.